


Wholesome, Even for the King

by petrichoral



Category: Wolf Hall Series - Hilary Mantel
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 18:19:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1097144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/petrichoral/pseuds/petrichoral
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Jane," Bess says, her voice lowered, "you know his Majesty can't court you forever."</p>
<p>"Yes," Jane says. She has considered this. "There are only so many suitable lines my name will scan in, unless he starts reusing verses."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wholesome, Even for the King

**Author's Note:**

  * For [yunitsa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yunitsa/gifts).



> Set roughly halfway through Bring up the Bodies. Many thanks to [elfwreck](../../users/Elfwreck/pseuds/Elfwreck) for beta.
> 
> [theviolonist](../../users/theviolonist/pseuds/theviolonist) has also written a lovely Cromwell PoV study for the same prompt: [Good Order, Counsel and Equity](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1133216)

_London, March 1536_

They say that the ghosts of the dead may come back from purgatory to ask us to pray for them. Who says this, Jane is unsure. It has always been presented to her as ‘they’: an indistinct, shifting crowd of people that her mother and the other ladies-in-waiting meet with regularly. Jane has no more than the usual court acquaintances; she cannot imagine knowing so many people that you cannot remember who said what to you.

She has heard this about the dead many times, though: once from her mother, twice from Mary Shelton and another time from Lady Worcester. But now (they say) we must not pray for our dead. Souls cannot be released from purgatory because now there is no such place as purgatory: you are in or you are out, no second chances, and praying for ghosts that don’t exist is a sin.

Jane prays anyway. She is not quick of study, but she cannot see that praying could be any worse than not praying. She prays for the late Queen. If Queen Katherine has a ghost, it is a stately, reserved one, one that does not haunt but merely kneels solemnly with her at the _prie-dieu_ , and takes the book with Jane’s hands, and speaks with Jane’s mouth. Jane prayed beside the Queen so many times, it is as if Her Grace has found her by herself and said, no, Jane; this is not your place; I shall lead my own prayers.

Her lips move in pale shadows of her late mistress’. _Benedicta tu in mulieribus_. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.

Jane should be wearing black, she knows, but Edward tells her to stay in her best.

 

*

 

Bess sits her down one day and says, "Nobody's told you, have they?"

"Told me what?" Jane says. She sits on a stool and pulls her skirts in around her legs. It is the end of March, a miserable March even by the usual standards of the month, and the draught in their bedchamber is laced with ice. The fabric rustles stiffly; she is still not accustomed to this brocade.

Bess _tch_ s. "I told them they'd need to make it plain, but I swear by my soul, there's more wool in our family's heads than in all Master Cromwell's warehouses." She smoothes her hands on her skirts, a nervous gesture. Jane watches her with interest. There isn't a great deal that makes Bess nervous. "Jane," she says, her voice lowered, "you know his Majesty can't court you forever."

"Yes," Jane says. She has considered this. "There are only so many suitable lines my name will scan in, unless he starts reusing verses."

"Yes, well," Bess says. "There must be an end point to it. He knows you will protect your virtue, so he must—" She stops, words apparently failing even her.

Jane looks down at her hands. The familiar shape of them always helps her to think. "You mean to say, he must either get tired of me, or marry me," she says. Everyone seems to have an aversion to saying it out loud, even in places where there is no one who could conceivably overhear. Jane wonders if they are afraid of the late Queen's ghost hearing. But then, she thinks, if Her Grace's spirit is around she must have heard a great deal worse by now. Jane hopes she will not linger for any time after her own death. Or, if she must haunt a palace, perhaps she can contrive to be at whichever one the court is not.

"Yes," Bess says. Her voice is very low now. "Jane, do you realise that would make you Queen of England? Do you realise that is what Edward and Tom want for you?”

_Queen of England._ It sinks into Jane’s mind like a gold piece dropped in a bog. She feels vulnerable, exposed to men with shovels coming to dig it out. England is too big, too vast to fit on this stool with her, in her tiny _prie-dieu_ closet, in the corner where she stands in the Queen’s chambers. England seems like a lot of responsibility. “I would rather be Jane Seymour of Wolf Hall, I think,” she says carefully.

“Think of it, Jane,” Bess says urgently. “The riches, the status!”

Jane obediently thinks of it.

After a moment, Bess clears her throat, and Jane realises, belatedly, that she should have responded. “No woman in your position would refuse,” Bess tells her, but her eyes do not seem that certain.

“Would you?” Jane says. “You did not like to leave Wolf Hall either.”

“Of course I would not,” Bess says bracingly. “Wolf Hall is nothing compared to England. It is your duty to your country and king, not to mention your family. Besides,” she adds, and her eyes go quickly to the door, as if fearful of the light sound of jewelled Boleyn slippers, and back to Jane, “you cannot really do worse at it than is being done now.”

 

*

 

The king’s letters are difficult to answer. He calls himself her loyal servant. This is patently not true; she very much doubts he would thrive on the twelve shillings a quarter she pays her maid. _I am stricken by the dart of love_ , he writes. Jane sympathises, she imagines that would be very painful. The misfortune continues: _I can neither eat nor sleep_. Jane stares at it for a long time, and, taking painstaking care with the scratchy nib, writes him out a recipe for a posset that her grandmother made, of great aid to the digestion.

She reads it over and finds herself dubious. No, it will not do. One cannot expect the king to make his own possets. She will simply make it for him; then perhaps, she thinks, she need not be expected to answer this letter.

 

*

 

In person, though, one cannot delay one’s answers. “My sweet mistress,” the king says, capturing her hand to put it on his arm. “Will you walk with me?”

“Gladly,” Jane replies. She is glad of the tension that suffuses her arm and her back; it is easy to stop herself from saying that the other option would require her to violently free her hand, possibly using some sort of winch, and that seems likely to make a scene. Besides, they are in the gardens; this is what one does in the gardens.

They stroll in the knot garden; the cold is less bitter in the high hedges. There are also fewer prying eyes; Jane mentally rehearses a prayer to the Holy Virgin, but it seems the king is merely pining. That is more difficult to respond to.

“Jane,” he says, and sighs. Then, “Jane,” again. Jane wonders if he is making sure of her name. Sometimes she knows men find it difficult to keep all these women straight.

“Yes,” she says, in case he needs confirmation.

He does not. “Jane, I think of you all the time. Only God knows my suffering, my pains when you are not there. Can you not give me some token of your affection? A word, only. Let me know that all my struggles are not to be in vain.”

“Your Majesty—”

“Will you not call me Henry?” the king asks pleadingly.

Jane’s mouth seizes up. She _cannot_. It must be possible, she knows, to arrange her tongue around the sounds, but it lies there, disobediently lax, and will not move for anything. “I received your letter,” she says, sliding around the issue. She tugs a piece of paper out of her belt pocket. “You must know that it might be misconstrued for an unmarried maiden to write in reply to such an august person as yourself, but I thought—I thought—”

The king’s expression is doting. “What did you think, my sweet Jane?”

She unfolds the paper. “I wrote out my grandmother’s recipe for a hot posset,” she says. “I thought I might make it for you, if your Majesty was agreeable. I can get the ingredients in the kitchens very easily.”

“My modest dove,” the king says. His eyes have misted over with a film of tears. “My devoted angel. With your own white hands!”

Jane allows him to clasp her hands. She thinks: there must be something else we can talk about. One can only spend so long on digestive troubles.  

 

*

 

She seeks an interview with Master Cromwell. Horses, he says, and cannon. Jane is glad she asked, because her guesses would never have come within a yard of that target, but it merely reinforces the hopelessness of the entire situation. Mary Sheldon is unlikely to help her here: if one knows nothing of cannon but the word, it will not help one's case to switch from English into French. She asks Edward.

"How to cast a cannon?" Edward says. For a moment he is all astonishment; disapproval is left running in late, its laces trailing. "Jane, is this some jest? I must say, I find it in poor taste."

"Apparently the king talks of it," Jane says. "I would know, if I am to make myself pleasing to him. As you told me to," she reminds him. It is very peculiar, how other people seem to forget things they have said from one day to the next and yet chide you if you happen to forget them. Jane makes a habit of repeating important conversations to herself while sewing. Eventually they settle in her mind, until she knows she can reach them as easily as putting her hand on the correct shade of embroidery thread.

Other people don’t seem to do this. The only other person she knows with a clear recollection is Master Cromwell, but he can hardly be repeating the Privy Council’s business over his sewing. She imagines him with a needle and thread, and the image fits surprisingly well; nobody has yet proved Master Secretary incompetent with any tool that comes to his hand.

“This is not a suitable topic for you,” Edward says disapprovingly.

“Well, what am I supposed to talk to him about?” Jane says. “He is running out of ways to compare flowers to various parts of my face. And running out of flowers, as well.”

Edward looks hunted, like a deer in a trap. “Desist, Jane. This is women’s gossip.”

“But it involves a man,” Jane points out, reasonably.

“Ask Bess!” Edward snaps. “This is not a suitable thing to bring to your brother!”

“But Bess doesn’t know anything about cannon _or_ horses,” Jane mutters, but she desists.

 

*

 

A letter arrives; it is from Master Cromwell. He – or one of his many busy clerks, but Jane thinks this hand is his – has written out three close pages on the subject of cannon, their founding and their firing. There are helpful diagrams. It might as well be in French for how much Jane understands of it.

Is this England? she wonders, staring out of the window with the papers on her knee. If the king is England and this is the king’s great passion, then is this the heart of it, _ballista_ and _saltpetre_ and _arquebuses_ , creaking carts of metal in foreign fields? She must be everything the king desires, her brothers tell her, but surely she cannot make herself into a two-ton culverin.

“I think he would do better to marry a foundry,” Jane says aloud, laying the papers aside. She looks around, surprised at the sound of her voice in the empty room.

 

*

 

Jane keeps her head down in the queen’s rooms. Mary Sheldon is approving, says that is the only way to deal with the queen now. I wouldn’t like to be in your place, she adds, though her voice suggests prurient interest. Jane does not tell her that her sewing is more interesting than the chatter, that it is really no hardship. She sews next to the diamond-paned windows and thinks of curtains of rain and bright sun racing across the fields of Wiltshire.

She knows when the queen is addressing her, because the words _little fool_ are repeated forcefully, like faint horns trying in vain to catch the attention of a scattered hunting party. Jane raises her head politely at the call.

“Are you hard of hearing?” Anne wants to know. Jane wonders what clever cutting remark she has just failed to react to. “Do you think being as deaf and dumb as a post is somehow appealing, Mistress Seymour?”

“No, your Highness,” Jane says dutifully.

“It is really a shame,” Anne remarks to her circle at large, “that most men like their women to be livelier than a graven image, or our little Jane would be the centre of the whole court. At least she has no talents likely to be missed when the king tires of her and her family lock her up in a convent.”

“That is true,” Jane says placidly. “Though I am progressing with my French.”

Anne throws back her head with her wicked, unaffected laugh. She says something in Latin, and the more educated half of the ladies-in-waiting break down into giggles.

Jane sews. She is not offended; compared to Queen Anne, her talents are paltry at best. However, as she has recently discovered, one can spend all one’s life acquiring Latin and Greek and composing sparkling verses only for it to turn out that what one actually needs to know is how to talk intelligently about cannon, and there, she feels, she and Anne are equally badly off.

Before dinner, the queen dismisses most of them, leaving just Lady Rochford and Lady Worcester to help her dress. The queen has become more self-conscious about her gravid stomach and her thinning body; she will not even allow her stomacher to be unpinned while Jane is in the room, but rests her hand on it and glares until Jane leaves.

In the corridor outside, Jane is lost in considering how on earth one would bring up a child to know everything they might possibly be called upon to know. She doesn’t see the man in the soft black cap passing until he is level with her. “Mistress Seymour.”

Jane turns, surprised to be singled out from the other ladies, and bobs a curtsey. “Master Secretary.”

“You are well?” Master Cromwell says courteously.

He has been like this more of late, ensuring he greets her punctiliously whenever they pass. Jane supposes it is a sign she is becoming more important. “Yes, thank you,” she says. She assumes he is well, he does not look ill, so instead of a reply she remembers a question she had been meaning to ask someone clever. “Master Secretary,” she says, “do you believe in ghosts?”

His lawyer’s eyes glint in his face. Jane has a sudden premonition of what the answer will be, and acts to forestall it. “Please,” she says, “do not quote me chapter and verse from learned men who all disagree with each other. Although one would think, really, that if they were all that learned they wouldn’t be in disagreement. A yes or no will suffice.”

Master Cromwell appraises her.  “A weighty question,” he says.

“Not really,” Jane says. “You must _have_ a belief.”

“I must,” he agrees, “but it may change depending on what purpose it is being put to.” He is different in his reactions to her than most people, and now she realises what it is: he is listening to what she has to say, rather than comparing it to what he thinks she should have said. That must leave him the attention spare to conceal any surprise; he is the first person Jane has conversed with at length without seeing them visibly taken aback.

“Well, if you do not wish to say then you do not have to, I suppose,” she says decidedly. “You must have a great many people asking you questions; I expect one would grow tired of them. Goodness knows I have. Good day to you.” She bobs a curtsey and turns away.

“Mistress Seymour,” Master Cromwell says, arresting her turn. He is not looking at her; he is gazing across the corridor, at a tapestry where a richly-coloured saint stands with an upraised arm; he is speaking as though to an empty room. “I have seen memories of the dead, though I cannot speak of how they relate to the soul of the departed. I will say this: that they are dead now. Their proper sphere of influence is outside ours.” The saint is looking back at him. It is not sacred communion; it is a staring match. “They do not have a voice in our actions,” Master Cromwell adds, as if shutting one of his ledgers.

The cold March wind gusts down the corridor. The palace is full of draughts. One of the retreating ladies has carelessly left the door to the queen’s rooms standing ajar; it slams shut with the wind. Out of the corner of her eye, Jane thinks she sees a stiff Spanish hem disappear inside it.

The sound makes Master Cromwell look up and seem to recall his errand. “I give you good day,” he says, and they exchange bows of the head.

The leaves are whirling outside in the courtyard, skittering with the wind into a semblance of life. Jane pauses in the stone archway. The clouds are rolling by: light, shade, light. A ghost here would be buffeted away by the gusting air. This is England, in spring. It does not have to be gentle.

Jane holds her skirts to keep them from blowing. She steps out to take the day on the terms it gives her, the only way she knows.

 


End file.
